An emergency working group established in July by Gov. Josh Green to speed delivery of affordable housing in Hawaii has gotten back to work after initial setbacks that included legal challenges and the resignation of its leader.

The Build Beyond Barriers Working Group has yet to receive and approve an application for residential development, but the 36-member panel during a Nov. 14 meeting issued its first decision, one related to housing production.

Panel members agreed to let two Hawaii County agencies sidestep state laws that govern employee hiring so that the agencies can more quickly fill chronically vacant positions.

The Planning Department and the Department of Public Works for Hawaii County sought exemptions to state civil service and collective bargaining statutes to more easily fill 19 vacant full-time positions representing 25% of full staffing.

Representatives of the two agencies said at the meeting that they will be able to more quickly process permits, including permits for affordable housing, with more staff.

“It’s been very challenging to maintain the level of services and operations that we would like to,” said Zendo Kern, Hawaii County Planning Department director.

The Planning Department had nine vacancies, and Public Works had 10.

Both agencies already prioritize processing of permits for affordable housing, though Kern and Malia Kekai, public works deputy director, said increased staffing would accelerate all permitting work.

The application from the two agencies estimated that successful expedited hiring of qualified workers would result in a 25% increase in affordable-housing units through permit approvals.

Hiring has been a struggle for both agencies during the past three years, in part because recruitment notices generate little response and because some good candidates choose other jobs because it can take months before a county job offer is extended.

“It’s a very long and arduous process,” Kern said at the meeting.

At a prior meeting of the panel, some concerns were raised over a similar request by the Hawaii Public Housing Authority.

HPHA, which manages low-income housing owned by the state, sought exemptions to hiring and procurement rules in an effort to fill more than 80 vacant positions to help accelerate repairs on more than 300 vacant units and process housing applications and assistance payments.

During an Aug. 29 meeting, Brenna Hashimoto, director of the state Department of Human Resources Development, questioned the need to sidestep the civil service statute because it already allows for exemptions.

Debra Kagawa-Yogi, a Hawaii Government Employees Association union representative, echoed Hashimoto’s point but also said an inability to compete with the private sector on pay is a big challenge in filling local government jobs, and that obtaining an exemption from collective bargaining statutes could put other agencies seeking workers at a disadvantage to HPHA.

“What you could be doing is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she said.

HPHA’s hiring exemptions were to be decided by Nani Medeiros, who at the time was Green’s chief housing officer and the working group’s leader. But that didn’t happen. Instead, Green on Sept. 15 replaced his original July 17 housing emergency proclamation with a new one that allowed such exemptions to be automatic for state, but not county, agencies.

Hakim Ouansafi, HPHA executive director, said during the Nov. 14 meeting that his staff held a hiring “open house” Nov. 4 in an effort to fill what had become more than 90 vacant positions.

During the four-hour event described by Ouansafi, staff reviewed applications, conducted 57 interviews followed by 36 secondary interviews and then made commitments of job offers to 22 applicants pending reference and information checks.

Ouansafi said the event bypassed a typical three-month wait to interview qualified applicants, and a total typical hiring timeline of three to six months involving the state Department of Human Resources Development.

“This suspension is to address the necessary need for housing to move forward,” he said at the meeting.

David Arakawa, a panel member representing large Hawaii landowners and developers through the Land Use Research Foundation, said county permitting agencies need the panel’s help to process residential development permits faster.

“If they don’t have the staff to do it, then we effectively grind this whole process to a halt where everything is going to take three to five years,” he said.

Only about 20 members of the panel, including Kern, attended the meeting. The requested hiring exemptions were approved unanimously at the end of the roughly 90-minute meeting, which was the panel’s second working meeting.

The first working meeting, which took place Aug. 29 and followed an Aug. 11 orientation meeting, was largely consumed by public testimony criticizing the panel’s existence, power and process after four development project applications by the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands were withdrawn from consideration.

In the wake of the Aug. 29 meeting, Medeiros resigned in response to what she said were personal threats made against her and family members.

Two lawsuits also had been filed by several people and organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai‘i and the Sierra Club, to contest the legality of the working group.

The litigation led Green to issue a revised third emergency housing proclamation on Oct. 24 that resolved the litigation after a Sept. 26 meeting was canceled.

Now, panel leadership is rotating among a three-person “housing team” made up of Ouansafi and the directors of two other state departments: Mary Alice Evans at the Office of Planning and Sustainable Development and Dean Minakami at the Hawaii Housing Finance and Development Corp.

Evans chaired the Nov. 14 meeting.

The panel’s next meeting is slated for this month, but a date has not yet been scheduled.

Meeting information is available at hale.hawaii.gov.